Free Hinduism: A Short History by Klaus K. Klostermaier Page A

a great deal of polemic from both sides. Those who defend the Āryan invasion theory and the chronology associated with it accuse the proponents of the “New Chronology” of indulging in Hindu chauvinism. The latter suspect the former of entertaining “colonial-missionary” prejudices and denying originality to the indigenous Indians. The new element that has entered the debate are scientific investigations. While the older theory relied exclusively on philological arguments, the new theory includes astronomical, geological, mathematical, and archeological evidence. 14 On the whole the “New Chronology” seems to rest on better foundations.
    Civilizations, both ancient and contemporary, comprise more than literature. Traditionally trained philologists – i.e. grammarians – are generally not able to understand technical language and the scientific information contained in the texts they study. Consider today’s scientific literature. It abounds with Greek and Latin technical terms, and contains an abundance of formulae composed of Greek and Hebrew letters. If scholars with only a background in the classical languages were to read such works, they might be able to come up with some acceptable translations of technical terms into modern English but they would hardly be able to make sense of most of what they read, and they certainly would not be able to extract the information which the authors of these works wished to convey through their formulas to people trained in their specialties.
    The situation is not too different with regard to ancient Indian texts. The admission of some of the top scholars (like Geldner, who in his translation of the
Ṛgveda
– deemed the best so far – declares many passages “darker than the darkest oracle,” or Gonda, who considered the
Ṛgveda
basically untranslatable) of being unable to make sense of a great many texts – and the refusal of most to go beyond a grammatical and etymological analysis of the texts – indicates a deeper problem. The Ancient Indians were not only poets and litterateurs, but they also had their practical sciences and their technical skills, their secrets and their conventions, which are not self-evident to someone who does not share their world. Some progress has been made in deciphering technical Indian medical and astronomical literature of a later age, in reading architectural and arts-related materials. However, much of the technical meaning of the oldest Vedic literature still eludes us.
    THE
Ṛ
GVEDA
– A CODE?
    The computer scientist/Indologist Subhash Kak believes he has rediscovered the “Vedic Code” on the strength of which he extracts from the structure as well as the words and sentences of the
Ṛgveda
considerable astronomical information which its authors supposedly embedded in it. 15 The assumption of such encoded scientific knowledge would make it understandable why there was such insistence on the preservation of every letter of the text in precisely the sequence the original author had set down. One can take certain liberties with a story, or even a poem, changing words, transposing lines, adding explanatory matter, shortening it, if necessary – and still communicate the intentions and ideas of the author. However, one has to remember and reproduce a scientific formula in precisely the same way it has been set down by the scientist, or it would make no sense at all. While the scientific community can arbitrarily adopt certain letter equivalents for physical units or processes, once it has agreed on their use, one must obey the conventions for the sake of meaningful communication.
    Even a non-specialist reader of ancient Indian literature will notice the effort to link macrocosm and microcosm, astronomical and physiological processes, to find correspondences between the various realms of beings, and to order the universe by establishing broad classifications. Vedic sacrifices – the central act of Vedic culture – were to be